Do your doctors ask about family history of cancer?

In another thread a member said that he had never been asked by any doctor if he had a family history of cancer. I was surprised by that because I think that every new doctor to whom I have gone in the last 20 years has asked that question either personally or by questionnaire. So...I'm just having Sunday curiosity about the prevalence of this so have assembled this simple poll.

Jim

Yes... but. I've found that doctors often receive the filled-in questionnaires, or get a filtered briefing from a nurse or PA, as they are walking into the visit with the patient, and they may only cursorily flip through it. I always tell guys never to assume that just because they wrote something down or told it to a nurse or PA that the doctor is aware of it. If you think it's important -- tell him and ask for a response.

Yes ever since I past 40 yrs old but never before that.

Edit to add: Younger then 40 they seemed to ask about alcohol and drug use.

In some cases, such as mine, it is virtually a given that the physician would ask this question.

I went to see a urologist (he's still my doc) about two years ago (when I was 65) with a pretty severe BPH problem. He naturally ran a PSA test on me, which came back 13.x something (as did follow-up PSA tests).

That's when the dominoes started falling (per signature below) that eventually led to my PCA Dx in that December.

Of course with all the things going on in my case, age, obvious prostate problem, high PSAs, it was only to be expected that my uro would ask about family history, which he did. It so happens that there is no family history in my case, but he did ask.

Apparently, as has been pointed out above, this is likely to be more of an issue for the younger guys, whose physicians may not be as attuned to asking about PCa in their age group as they probably should be.

Only via questionnaires, which I doubt they look at.

I've forgotten many more interesting things but I don't recall questions about cancer in the family when I was in my 30s and going for forced visits due to parasites contracted in India (3 times) or lymes disease.

Yeah, they used to ask about cigarettes, drugs and drinking.

I normally get asked by every nurse before I see the Doc....at least as a new patient. Its always been a part of the inproccessing on their paperwork/computer...and if the doc doesn't mention it...I will.  Id like to make sure my primary care dr. is aware of that in case they need it for drug interactions.

My Dr. told me to mention to my dentist about me on Xgeva....my dentist looked at me confused and had never heard of it....LOL.